FACTORALY - E13 BOTTLES

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

In this episode, you'll discover how long glass bottles have been around (longer than you may think), and how to open a bottle of Champagne with a sabre. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello? Hello. Who are you? Me? Oh, I'm Simon Wells. Who are you? Er, pass. Well, I tell you what, I think you're Bruce Fielding. I've heard that name. Have you?

Yes, several times. It must be me. I think you're Bruce Fielding, voiceover artist extraordinaire and co-host of the ever-popular weekly podcast, Factorily. Factorily? I've heard of that. You have? Is it any good? I've been told it's all right. Well, I might listen in then. So Simon Wall's voiceover, what are we talking about this week? Well, this week, as with every week, we pick a random subject that you wouldn't really think would have an awful lot of material

in it. And then pages and pages of notes later, it turns out it's actually quite interesting. Yes. and this appears to have been another one of those this week we are talking about bottles bottles not the sort of not not the kind of thing that you lose no you don't want don't want to lose your bottle no no the sort of thing you drink out of or keep stuff in yes Yes. Okay, let's start there. Okay, then let's start there. The definition of a bottle is a glass or plastic container with a narrow neck used for storing drinks or other liquids. Ah, they're not always glass though, are they? Because the Mesopotamians didn't use bottles made of glass or plastic, did they? Although, you know, Mesopotamian plastic is obviously very rare. Very rare indeed, I should think think yeah they would use things like uh gourds or the skins of animals

to keep liquids in but they would they be bottles as such hard to say isn't it whether they would have given it a particular name so um to go down an etymological route as often we do uh the word bottle has a bit of a journey uh the the word bottle comes from french boite uh boite comes from the old french bote bote comes from the latin buttis um and the latin buttis means a cask or a flask like a butt like a butt of marmsey but a water butt yeah okay let's assume there's all the same root as as a bottle yeah interesting it all comes back to the butt but actually they did used to be um glass bottles very very long time ago how long ago 1 bc so my my research has told me that it's about 1 bc that's quite a long time ago.

That is quite a long time ago. And originally what they did was they would sort of like make a clay model of a jar or something or a bottle. And then they would surround this with sand or the silica, the material that glass is made from. Yeah. And then build a fire over it so that that melted. Oh, I see. And then chip away all the clay that had been moulded around. Oh, I see.

Okay, clever. But then the blowpipe was invented. The blowpipe was invented around sort of 1 BC. And this allowed molten glass to be gathered on the end of the pipe and then blown into a hollow vessel. I mean, that was done... As long ago as that? That was done, yeah, 2,000 years ago.

Gosh. Long, long time ago. So this will be interesting. You and I go away with the subject title and nothing else. We do our own research, we come back. Sometimes we've accidentally researched the same things. Sometimes we've researched completely different things. So it'll be interesting to see which ones I've picked up on and which ones you've picked up on. Well, yes. Given the nature of our drinking habits,

I would expect you to be beer bottle. Interesting. And I would expect me to be wine bottle. Right. Okay. Okay. One of the things I did do a bit of research on was champagne bottles, unless you've done some research on champagne bottles. Well, I haven't done research on champagne bottles per se, but I have done some research on the various different bits of a bottle. Ooh, okay. Well, let's start there. So let's start at the top with the orifice or throat or bore, which is basically the hole at the top of the bottle. Would never have thought it had so many names.

Yes, it's called all sorts of things. Then you've got the bit just below the hole, which goes from the hole to the collar, which is there's normally a collar around just there, and which goes from the hole to the collar which is there's normally a collar around yes just there and that's called the lip or the finish right then there's the neck of the bottle which is the bit below the collar okay and then you've got a shoulder which looks like somebody's droopy shoulder yes yes you're describing this very well i can picture it and then and then you've got the main body of the of the bottle yeah and then you have the most interesting bit which is the in sweep

or heel i mean it's also called lots and lots of other things as well see i would just call that the bottom would i be frowned upon in certain certain circles it is the bottom but it's also called it's got a name which we currently associate with sort of bras so where the bottom is there's actually a bit which is called the the push-up oh is that the the sort of the dimpley bit exactly it's called the kick up or push up is it and um so that's that's so you've got the heel or the in sweep and then so the heel is and the reason that that um kick up or push up is there there's there are a couple of reasons for that there's there's the nice reason which is that

it gives you a nice you can put the bottle on a any kind of surface and it's more likely to be level and therefore not to fall over oh i see um the the second reason is that um sediment gets sort of caught around the edge of that kick up so that the wine remains pure and there's like a little circle of of sediment at the bottom yes and then there's the pragmatic one which is that if you have a very large kick-up in a bottle, then you don't have to put quite so much liquid in it, and it'll still look like you've got quite a big bottle. There's also the serving reason, which is that a well-trained waiter can put his thumb in, or her thumb into the kick-up and pour the bottle one-handedly.

Yes, that looks very suave. It does, doesn't it? Very suave. Well, I'm learning things already. I never knew there were so many parts to a bottle. Oh, I've just remembered something that I haven't researched, but I've remembered how to do it. So have you ever seen any, talking of champagne bottles, have you ever seen anybody use a saber to open a champagne bottle? I have i have yes they sort of lay the saber flat against the bottle and swipe upwards towards the orifice as i now know it's called yes knocking the cork out of the end well actually that's not what happens shame so if you look at a bottle

generally speaking now they have a seam if you look you look at the glass, there's a seam on the glass because they're actually molded bottles rather than blown. So in the molding, there's all sorts of information on the bottle within the molding of the glass. But one of the key things is that there's actually a seam goes up the side of the glass. When you take the sabre to the the bottle of champagne and listeners may find this useful for the future so get your take your number one take your saber and slide actually number one listen to the episode on tools that distinguishes the difference between a sword a saber and a rapier yes and an epi and an epi and and um, yes, they slide the sabre up the seam quite quickly towards the collar. And then as the sabre hits the collar, not only does the cork come out,

but the entire top of the bottle comes off. Does it? Very neatly in a nice circle. And you don't get any broken glass in the bottle comes off. Does it? Very neatly, in a nice circle. And you don't get any broken glass in the bottle because the expelling of the champagne inside pushes any broken glass out of the way. But if you look at a bottle that's been opened with a sabre, you will see that the whole of the top's gone. Right. That's a good fact.

Thank you. You're welcome now my facts about champagne bottles essentially it comes down to the fact that the the champagne bottle as we know it was invented in england sorry france Sparkling wine has been around since medieval times, but it was originally seen as a flaw to have bubbles in your wine. The wine had been left in the cold cellar for too long. It's gone off.

It's gone off, yeah. The fermentation process has continued. It's got bubbles in it. No one wants that. The bubbles would break the glass bottles bottles which back then were thinner and not as sturdy as they are now so it was a problem and over the years people sort of started quite liking this these bubbles you know the bottles that did survive were quite rare and therefore the rich took them on and said oh look at this i've got this sparkling wine how exciting

but the bottles were never strong enough to be mass produced and used for that intention. In 1615, James I, who was warring with some country or other, I don't remember which one, might be France, might be Spain, we alternate. Was this James I who was James VI? That's the one, James I of England. So the one country that it wouldn't have been is Scotland. Scotland, exactly. Unless they were having an off day.

Yes. So James I, or the VI, depending on which way you look at it, he was at war. He was making lots of ships for his navy. He made it law that no oak trees could be felled in this country for any purpose other than making ships for his navy. The bottle manufacturers, glass manufacturers, had always used charcoal for their furnaces,

which is obviously made out of wood. So they had to suddenly switch to coal because they weren't allowed to use wood for that purpose anymore their coal furnaces burnt at a higher temperature higher temperature in making glass makes tougher stronger glass that makes sense and so it was only as a result of that that the the glass used in wine bottles could be made thicker stronger, and withstand the pressure of the fizz. So it's kind of down to that random law about the Navy that ended up with bottles that could take on the job. Wow.

Apparently the pressure inside a champagne bottle is up to three times the pressure of a car tyre, which is more than I would have thought. Yeah, what's that about? Sort about 70, 80 psi or something? Something like that. And it was officially written down, the process of making sparkling wine was first documented in 1662, so sort of 50 odd years after the whole wood charcoal thing, by an English physician called Christopher Merritt.

And he first documented the process of how to make sparkling wine, which was a full 35 years before some French dude called Don Perignon invented champagne. Yes, there's all sorts of weird things to do with champagne, isn't there? If you want to be very poncy, you talk about, I'll have a bottle of the Widow, please. The Widow? Yes, the Widow Clicquot. Ah. Apparently we've been pronouncing Moet and Chandon wrong for all these years.

Have we? Yeah. We're pronouncing Moet as if it were a French word. It isn't. It's Dutch. It's Moet. And they would pronouncing Moet as if it were a French word. It isn't. It's Dutch. It's Moet. And they would pronounce it Moet. So the Queen lyrics, she keeps a Moet enchandon in a pretty cabinet. No, she doesn't.

No, she keeps the Moet enchandon. Yeah, there we go. It's a bit like that Lothario, isn't it? Don Juan. Oh, yes, Don Juan, right. Don Juan, whose name actually should be pronounced Don Juan. Oh, is that right? So if you look at the poem, Don Juan works because it rhymes with other stuff in the poem, whereas Don Juan doesn't.

Oh, how interesting. Apparently we pronounce Mount Everest wrong. Do we? The chap who named that mountain pronounced his surname Everest. Ah. Yeah. Everest. Everest. So basically we pronounce most stuff wrong. We do. We're English. We're lazy. We can't be bothered.

Yeah. So anyway. So bottles. Oh yes. Is it all boot... Bottles. Yes. Bottles. Bottles. So they've been around for a while. Is it all bootles? Yes, bot-less. Bot-less. So they've been around for a while. And we just talked about opening a bottle.

But closing a bottle has been sort of quite interesting as well, hasn't it? So they started off by closing them with just wax, just getting some wax out. And then someone worked out that actually you could shove a cork in it, as my friends often tell me to do. But then nowadays we have the screw top. Yes, we do. And apparently there's a bit of snobbery about corks versus screw tops, but screw tops are technically better for the wine than corks.

Really? Yes. How so? tops are technically better for the wine than corks really yes how so uh because the cork adds another chemical element to the liquid inside obviously okay whereas a screw top doesn't the screw top is usually it's like coated in the insides coated with plastic so that it doesn't actually interact with the um the liquid inside at all. How interesting. Yes, I would automatically think of a corked bottle as being higher quality than a, you know, at least higher price. Generally, they're more expensive, and generally they're still kind of like, there's a very great snobbery about, you know,

like the wine waiter will come over to your table and flamboyantly and with a great deal of performance will remove the cork from the bottle. Yes. And then hand you the corkscrew with the cork still attached to the corkscrew so you could sniff it. Yes. And see whether the wine is corked or not. Yes.

A lot of wine comes in coloured glass bottles. That's true, yes. Usually green, isn't it? Usually green or brown. Yeah. Why is that? Well, that's because of ultraviolet light. Of course. Because light getting through into the wine is not good for the wine. So what you want is something that's going to chop out the UV so that the wine stays stable and isn't affected by light.

I see. So you know what a wine bottle looks like. Then there are larger bottles of champagne and wine. Yes. So you get a magnum, which is a chap who lives in Hawaii and solves crimes and stuff. Or two bottles of wine right and then you get a jeroboam okay which is four bottles of wine then you get the one that racing drivers like which the one that they shake on the podium

and that's a methuselah that's eight bottles of wine as if the biblical character methuselah is twice as big as the biblical character Jeroboam. Well, then you get Salmanazar, which is 10 bottles. Right. And Nebuchadnezzar, who's 20 bottles. Solomon, that's 24 bottles, champagne

mostly. A sovereign, which is 35 bottles. And that's the biggest you can get, a sovereign of wine but I don't think anybody can actually pick up a sovereign of wine, you have to have it delivered on a truck The shape of some bottles is just so iconic

it's ridiculous there is one bottle that is the best known shape in the whole and you know there's one of one there is one bottle that is the best known shape in the whole world you know what it is i'm going to take a wild stab in the dark at coca-cola correct it is ever so iconic isn't it without it just a pure silhouette of the outline of that bottle you know exactly what you're about to drink yes what do you know of the history of the coca-cola bottle nothing brilliant just well. That's one of the areas that I researched. Is it? It is. Brilliant. See, we said at the beginning that we don't know what each other's researched.

Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. I know. So Simon, I'm now sitting comfortably. Tell me all about the Coca-Cola bottle. Then I'll begin. Once upon a... No. So when Coca-Cola was first produced, it was a fountain drink. So there would be sellers, shops, who had large containers of Coca-Cola and decanted it into a smaller container for you or just served you a cup full as you went to the store um it was not until the 1890s which actually is still you know quite a long time ago yes um a couple of lawyers from chattanooga which i can't hear without thinking of the choo-choo uh these two lawyers joseph

whitehead and benjamin thomas came up up with this idea of bottling Coca-Cola in just a very simple, straight, ordinary-looking bottle. And they managed to get the right to bottle Coca-Cola. And they set up all these other branches, all these other bottling plants around America that started bottling Coca-Cola in 1899. And it remained a fairly boring, straight bottle for a handful of years. It wasn't until 1916 that the predecessor of what we would know now, it looks very similar, it's not quite the same,

but that sort of curved hourglass-looking shape was invented in 1916. And that's pretty much what it's been served in ever since. By the year 1920, there were over 1,200 Coca-Cola bottling plants around the United States. Wow. They make quite a few bottles. In 2016, Coca-Cola produced over 110 billion

bottles of Coca-Cola in that year alone. Billion with a B. Wow. So we've covered wine and champagne bottles. We've covered soft drink bottles. Something else I looked at was feeding bottles. Oh, right. For babies. Yeah. Baby feeding bottles go back way longer than I would ever have expected. In one form or another, they have existed since at least the Roman era,

if not before. There have been clay bottles discovered in ancient burial grounds next to the remains of an infant. In the Roman era, they were already writing about the fact that they were worried that these bottles were not sufficiently hygienic and another method ought to be come up with. So they're really old, apparently. In the 1700s, they were made out of metal of various types. Before that, they have been made out of perforated cow horns. And, you know, the baby would just suckle on the end of the cow horn.

Wow. With a few holes punched in it. In 1770, there was a fellow called Hugh Smith who patented the Bubby Pot, which I think is a wonderful name. The Bubby Pot. The Bubby Pot. Was he think is a wonderful name. The Bubby Pot. The Bubby Pot. Was he English or American?

He was English. He worked at the Middlesex Hospital in London. Not in Middlesex, obviously. And he created this thing. It sort of looked a bit like a coffee pot, but with an extended spout that you could just sort of pour milk directly into the the child's mouth um and then they sort of got refined slightly the the idea of having a little teat of some form on the end that the baby could actually suck came along and even those have gone through quite a few different permutations they were

made out of um lots of different materials they were the sort of that you had a rag just stuffed in the end of a bottle and the baby would suck on the rag. Osmosis. That makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, doesn't it? Although wouldn't all the goodness get sucked out of the milk by the rag? Well, probably. You'd probably end up sucking some very disgusting tasting milk, I should think. Then teats were made out of cork with bits of leather strapped around them in the 1800s that was a a thing that went on um it wasn't until 1845 that indian rubber was first used to make

something that would look you know quite similar to a modern day bottle teat that we would know now but indian rubber tastes disgusting So they weren't popular. And so it wasn't until the 20th century that they sort of started making these things out of PVC and other tasteless, bland materials that are easily produced and have become the staple that they are now. According to, I didn't know this existed the global baby bottle market hi i work for the the global baby that's hard to say we should use that as one of our warm-ups in in our voiceover the global baby bottle market global baby bottle market yes that works um in in 2022 so just last year the global baby bottle market was estimated... Very good. I'm impressed.

Thank you. I've been practicing. ...was valued at around $3.46 billion US dollars. Crikey. So there's a lot of money being spent on baby bottles. Yes. So glass bottles, they shoot them in in westerns don't they they line them up on a wall and shoot yeah they use them for target practice don't they but but the ones that they hit you over the head with in in movies are not glass come again so the so they're sugar so the glass bottles that that if you're if you're involved in a bar fight in a Western, with a beer bottle or a whiskey bottle, the likelihood is that it's made of sugar.

Really? Yes. And they break very easily. I mean, even when you're bringing the bottle down on someone's head, you have to watch out that the neck doesn't come apart from the main body of the bottle. They're very delicate. And then presumably the unmistakable sound of shattering glass is added on post-production. Totally, yes, absolutely.

I guess that makes sense. Some of those Westerns did involve an awful lot of being smacked over the head with a bottle. You could have an injury. Yes, going through glass windows and stuff as well. Yeah, yeah. So presumably there are companies who just make sugar bottles. There are. Huh. And yes, purely for theatre, film.

I mean, if you go to a play and somebody gets hit by a bottle, unless it's the audience throwing the bottles, of course, it's generally made of sugar. Were there any other types of bottles into which you researched, Bruce? There weren't, although I know there are lots more. And how about you, Simon? I went on a little trip down hot water bottles that didn't last terribly long.

I have several different shapes of hot water bottle that didn't last terribly long i have i have several different shapes of hot water bottle do you yes in fact i also have a cold water bottle i have an ice pack water bottle okay so i have a the ice pack one is a circular water bottle which i shall go and get you in a minute and show you thank you um but it looks like you know in, in old 1930s films where someone gets a black eye. Yes. And they put something on their face to kind of get rid of the bruise. That puckered up leather pouch with a bottle top. Well, it's that.

But this is a blue, it's made by Thermos, I think. It's like a circular blue hot water bottle. Right. Flat. And you fill it up with ice water and you can put it on your head and and bring down swelling but i also have a a long thin water bottle i'm not exactly sure what the long thin one is for i've never really used it but i also have one inside i have one inside a teddy bear yes okay lovely charming what a lovely image, the teddy bear is actually exactly the same as my dog.

So it's technically inside a bearded collie. Brilliant. There can't be terribly many of those around. I don't know why I've got so many hot water bottles, because I don't use them that much. Well, some people collect stamps. Some people collect bottles. I have one very standard hot water bottle inside a spotty orange fluffy case. Please listeners, tell us your hot water bottle preferences in the comments. Yes, please do. And pictures, ideally. Oh yeah, pictures. Why not? Yes, do it.

So that's modern hot water bottles bottles the predecessors of hot water bottles have been around since at least the 16th century um people would have either clay ceramic containers yes they were ceramic i remember yeah yeah or or metal later on, just filled with coals, leftover coals from the day's fire. And these bed warmers were inserted into the bed. They were taken out before you went to bed so that you didn't hurt yourself because they were quite warm. But they were there just to warm the bed before you got in. Eventually the coals were replaced with hot water, which meant they weren't so hot so they could stay in

bed with you overnight and maintain that that heat metal ones existed glass ones existed and then eventually to prevent burning they became wrapped up in soft fluffy material as they are now. Because bottles weren't cheap to produce. So they were used to hold expensive things inside them. And one of the things that was very expensive was perfume. Oh, of course, yeah. And if you think about it, so much creativity goes into the creation of a perfume bottle. If you go into the perfume department of a department store, just the techniques and the style of it. And that's always been the case.

I mean, even like sort of 1000 BC, the Egyptians used amazing, clever glass almost exclusively for perfume. Really? As far back as the Egyptians? Wow. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. The Romans, they thought perfumes were aphrodisiacs, so they kept them sort of quite subtly. And they used blown glass and molded glass bottles for perfume.

But then sort of about 1,200 years later, in the 12th century, there was a statute in France forming the Guild of Parfumeurs. Then, sort of the Venetians started to make very ornate glass. I mean, Venetian glass is still highly prized. Yeah, of course, yes. And then it sort of started,

the scent bottle was made in gold and silver and copper and glass and porcelain and enamel. All sorts of different things. And they were shaped in different, like animals. They were shaped like cats and birds. Interesting. But then in the 1920s, you get people like René Lalique, who was a famous french jeweler who revived the interest in bottles with molded glass which were just amazing looking things so so perfume actually led to a lot of um creativity in in bottles as it as it still is now yes if you see a bottle of perfume that's

shaped like a sailor do you know who makes that perfume oh with the with the the stripy the horizontal stripy t-shirt i can picture that um i'll give you a clue his initials are jpg jean paul gaultier yes i think actually some of the perfume although some of it comes in sort of bottles that look like very hench kind of sailors for the female fragrances they look very much like sort of bondage wear or very strange sort of sexually arresting shapes. Interesting. But they've all got this hourglass shape. Yes.

Yeah. So you can tell a Jean-Paul Gaultier fragrance from a distance. Ah, not to be confused with a Coca-Cola bottle. Yes. Exactly. The hourglass thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Don't try and drink the Jean-Paul Gaultier fragrances, though. No. No. thing yeah yeah don't try and drink the jean paul gaultier fragrances though no no well simon that's that that's all i know about bottles what about you is that have we come have we come to the to the neck of our or are we just down to the dregs yes i think we've we've got ourselves down to the the kick up of of this topic it's um more than i ever thought we could grab it rabbit on about bottles. I'm quite impressed. I know. Well, maybe we should put a cork in it?

Yes. And say thank you to everybody who's been listening to us for this episode. We do appreciate you listening to us, and actually, we just love whispering onto each other. We would still do this without you, frankly, but it would be a much lonelier existence.

We are much happier to share this ridiculous show with people who like to listen to it. Absolutely. So thank you all for being those people. We appreciate your ears. So please come again next week for another exciting episode of... Factory! Goodbye. Take care. Bye-bye now.